


Under Open Stars

by kyanve



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Fluff, M/M, pre-kerberos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-03-23 18:45:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13793880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyanve/pseuds/kyanve
Summary: After attempts at looking out for the Garrison's prodigy and resident antisocial cryptid, Shiro finds some of it turned back on him - and instead of spending a holiday alone, ends up out at the shack for the first time, sharing plans for the future.





	Under Open Stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [InterdictedInk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InterdictedInk/gifts).



Keith didn’t like talking about himself. It was hard not to notice the other cadet a few years behind him with a penchant for occasionally beating his sim scores and a confusing record of high marks on team exercises along with getting into fights. Shiro had gotten curious, and then landed into a mix of respect and confused worry as he realized that nobody knowing anything about Keith meant that Keith wasn’t talking to anyone. 

He made a habit of checking on other students. It was a routine, and when he started including Keith in his rounds of seeing if some of the others needed anything, he’d gotten baffled, suspicious looks and Keith insisting he was fine. 

The first time he saw Keith hiding out on a rooftop, he’d feared the worst and climbed up after, only to find Keith with his tablet out, going over reading. 

It had taken a few minutes of confused staring for Keith to realize why someone would be worried that a withdrawn, less social cadet was climbing up to normally less than accessible rooftops. 

After it had sunk in, there had been confused fumbling at an explanation Keith didn’t seem to have entirely himself, and then a period of bafflement before it had fallen into an odd kind of routine - Keith going up to rooftops to get away because high places apparently felt more secure, Shiro following him up when he could, sitting and maybe going with idle small talk until Keith felt like talking. 

Almost everything Keith was willing to talk about was class related; instructors, course material, occasionally rambling with honest curiosity and interest about some hypothetical new ideas for getting a ship that could make it to another star or some bit of his studies that’d caught his attention. Keith never talked about himself.

After a couple of incidents of fights where he’d ended up ducking off the rooftop to get cold packs for bruises, Keith started following him around more closely; he’d overheard the tail end of Iverson dressing him down for it, with threats of disciplinary action if he kept getting in trouble. 

When Keith stopped putting distance on Matt, it seemed stubborn - almost like he was expecting to be challenged for being there. Matt had only taken it as time to start teasing Shiro about his stray cat, and trying to engage Keith in conversation himself. At first it seemed like an effort that mostly failed.

The tipping point, before Shiro realized it, was when he'd been sitting outside and Matt had collared him to toss a takeout bag in his lap, with a fussy rant about being gone for a few days visiting family and _knowing_ Shiro wasn't eating much other than instant macaroni and cheese again, takeout wasn't much better but it was something, he did need to eat and couldn't live off Kraft and coffee.

He'd noticed Keith shooting him a dubious, baleful look, but Keith hadn't said anything at the time.

Keith went off the Garrison campus before dawn that Saturday.

He occasionally vanished over the weekends without explanation, that wasn't unusual.

The knock on the door of Shiro's room on base, close to noon on Sunday, was new. 

He opened the door to find Keith with a duffel bag and a serious expression, staring up at him. "I'm cooking." 

Shiro didn't have the first clue how to react to this; he blinked down at Keith with a confused "Sure?", and stepped out of the way for Keith to enter the small barracks room he stayed in most of the time. 

The duffel bag turned out to have a couple of wax-paper wrapped packages, packed in with frozen coldpacks; Keith set them out on the counter and went through the tiny kitchenette, opening cabinets to get bearings before he started pulling out pans and digging through the meager handful of plastic spice bottles he'd brought with him.   
One of the packages was a decent sized chunk of red meat, big enough to be a pricey beef roast, another was a handful of prickly pear leaves. There was a small bag of cheap dinner rolls, a little battered by the trip. 

It took a minute for Shiro to actually get bearings to ask questions. "Are you sure about this? That can't have been cheap." He motioned at the meat; it wasn't like Keith had time to have a good income around his training and studies.

Keith waved the question away without looking up from cutting it into more manageable pieces. "It's venison," he said, as if that somehow explained everything.

It raised more questions than answers; wild game was either more expensive, or something you went out and killed yourself. 

He was staying on the other side of the counter that divided the small room, leaning over to watch while trying to make sure Keith had plenty of space to work. The kitchen didn't give much space to avoid accidental introductions to knives. "I didn't know you went deer hunting."

Keith blinked and edged away a little, suddenly looking self-conscious, but he only answered with a noncommittal noise and a shrug, returning his attention to his cooking in a very blatant attempt at avoiding conversation. 

So that wasn't a good topic, or at least, Keith wasn't ready to talk about anything outside the Garrison campus yet. Nobody except the administrators actually knew much about him. Even his roommate had no idea of his past or life outside. While Gabe was competitive and hard to handle, he did respect Keith's scores and had passed the point where there would've been a fight if one was going to happen. If someone got over that threshold, he was chatty enough that his lack of any clue about Keith as a person was impressive in dubious ways. 

There probably wasn't much new about classes compared to Friday evening when he'd gotten Keith talking before, and it felt a little awkward to be resorting to that when Keith was in the apartment cooking dinner. "If you wanted to hang around after dinner, Matt found some of the early Star Trek series; we were going to take some time off tonight." 

The Garrison was a space program. There were some things that were commonalities with almost everyone there, that had always been a part of the history of space exploration. Judging by the way Keith did a considering half-glance up from the meat, 'anyone in the space program is at least a closet nerd' was a good guess.

"I've never seen most of the older stuff. Just a few episodes of the more recent one." 

"Then all the more reason to hang around, right?" He grinned, although he was already unsure if it'd be pushing or not. "If you're interested, I mean."

Keith shifted weight from one foot to the other, poking the meat he was cooking. "...Sure."

"We'll be glad to have you - and it's the least we can do after you've gone to this much trouble." He leaned on the counter. 

Keith did seem to be relaxing a little, at least, although he startled when the door opened, Matt breezing in. "Sorry I'm in a little late, there was some traffic coming back from Tucson. Should I order-" Matt stopped just inside the door, staring at Keith in the kitchen and everything he was working on. Keith blinked, staring back. "Oh. Wow. You can cook."

"Uh. Sort of?" Keith looked down at the pans, suddenly self-conscious. "Enough to get by." 

"Better than either of us!" Matt laughed, coming in to set down a grocery bag on the counter. "I got soda and popcorn for later." He paused by Shiro, nudging him with one elbow and a grin. 

Keith stayed hovering over his cooking, although he was shifting around to give more space on wherever Matt was; Shiro did notice Matt giving a foot or two on the counter after the first time Keith adjusted. It took a few minutes for him to seem less jittery, but after a while he seemed accept Matt's normal level of banter as background noise, even if he stayed quiet through the conversation about the weather, how things were in the city, and plans for the night. 

Keith's efforts with the sliced meat and chunks of cactus were simple, but it was still definitely a solid home-cooked meal, more than they'd often get around the Garrison.   
When they settled down for the evening, Keith found a perch on a chair, away from the couch.

It was mostly a relaxed evening, even if Keith mostly kept to himself quietly. He did, as the night went on, slowly start joining in commentary occasionally, dry sarcasm here and there, but he would fall self-consciously quiet any time there was too much focus on him in the conversation. 

It felt like some kind of breakthrough anyway; a little victory where Keith was allowing people in his space outside of classes and necessity a little more than usual. 

Keith dropping in to cook became an occasional routine; sometimes with whatever was in the fridge, sometimes with deer or javelina. After a while, he would occasionally chime in with a comment on other conversations Shiro was involved in, on a list of random and seemingly disconnected subjects with no explanation given to why he'd picked up any of them.

Local ecology and wildlife behavior made some sense, if he was going out game hunting. It got less easy to track from there - archaeology, photography, archaic German swordsmanship, local agriculture and ranching, horsemanship and horse behavior, theoretical xenobiology. The last one was at least part of the Garrison curriculum, except as far as Shiro knew, Keith hated the class. "One lightning storm short of Frankenstein" was a common kind of joke about the professor who taught it, but Keith seemed almost genuinely terrified, avoiding the man whenever possible and only engaging in the class enough for a decent grade. 

Shiro still heard nothing about where Keith had picked most of it up or what Keith did over holidays or breaks. While some of it was nonsensical, other parts painted a worrying picture; Keith spoke about how to live off the land a little too easily, with too much casual familiarity. There was no mention or indication of family or anyone else, either, and no evidence of anyone sending gifts or trying to check on him.

It worried him; Keith acted like it was all routine, but Keith also ended up in periodic fights, and Shiro regularly caught him hiding out on rooftops aroud the Garrison. He fought and clawed for top marks in everything, but did it with a kind of single-minded obsessive focus that left little room for anything else. 

Shiro wasn’t sure how he’d gotten Keith’s attention enough to get included in his priorities. It was weirdly flattering, and he wasn’t sure what to do with it, besides shoot Matt warning looks for teasing him about having an admirer.

************************

When the winter break loomed, Shiro got his bags tossed into Matt’s old car and tried to catch Keith at his dorm so that he could at least get a ride to wherever he was going.

The door opened to Gabe, confused, already out of uniform with his own luggage lined up and no sign of Keith even existing. “Shiro, right?”

“Yeah, I was just looking for Keith - is he around?”

Gabe shook his head. “He was packed last night and out the door before I woke up this morning.”

“Oh.” Shiro blinked, dumbfounded, and yet not sure what he’d expected. “Did he say anything about where he was going?”

Gabe shook his head. “You kidding? He’s a bloody cryptid around holidays, just hikes off out the gate and vanishes. He’s started answering, but uh. The last few times I’ve asked?” Gabe raised his hands helplessly. “Last year he said he was gonna visit Valinor, then he said he was spending summer with family around Erebor. This last week alone he’s said he’s heading to Utumno, Kasshyk, and Angband.” After counting it all off, he looked up. “I had to read the Silmarillion so I could catch it faster when he was fucking with me. Have you ever read that brick? It reads like a damned textbook.”

Shiro was trying not to laugh. “I hadn’t taken him for a Tolkien fan.”

Gabe stared off into the middle distance. “He keeps a paper journal with notes in _Sindarin_. To this day I’ve got no clue what it’s for, just that he was smug enough to choke a horse when he realized I’d tried.”

Not laughing was getting harder, and he’d slipped into a lopsided grin. “Well, it looks like I missed him - thanks for what you could answer, at least. Have a good holiday.”

They were driving out of town later, just hitting the highway towards Tucson. Matt had been quiet part all the way through town before he finally spoke up. 

“Are you sure about this? Going back to an empty house and all?”

Shiro shrugged, staring out across the desert. “I’m not sure what else I’d even do. It’s not like I’ve got anywhere else to go.”

“I could always call ahead and you could come home with me. You know Dad would love to have you, and Mom and Katie’d be thrilled to see you again.”

“I couldn’t impose on all of you like that-“ 

He stopped in mid-sentence, a familiar flash of red along the road ahead.

Matt slowed down, spotting it too; Keith was hiking along the side of the road, duffel-bag thrown over one shoulder, a water bottle hanging from his free hand. Keith glanced back warily, veering further off the road into the scrub as the car pulled up until he saw Shiro waving him over from the open passenger window. 

“Keith! Are you alright?” 

“Yeah?” Keith blinked at him, suddenly self-conscious. “I’m fine, I’m just headed home. It’s a bit out of the way. I do this every year.”

Matt leaned forward, peering around Shiro. “You need a ride? We’re heading the same way.”

Keith’s eyes widened and he shook his head. “No that’s okay - it’s not that bad of a hike, it’s a little chilly this time of year but I’ll be home before dark.”

Shiro frowned, leaning on the open car window. “You know it’s okay, right? Nobody’s going to ask you for more than you want to say here, or think any less of you for anything. We just want to help if we can.”

Keith shuffled his feet, looking away, then looking up at Shiro uncertainly. He frowned, nudging a couple rocks with one foot. “...There’s a side road a few miles up… you can drop me off there, it’s closer.”

Matt grinned. “Alright then, hop in!”

Keith was tense and restless for most of the trip down the highway, fidgeting occasionally; when he called that it was coming up, the turn lead to a dirt road that wound off into the scrub hills. Matt slowed down with a frown, turning to look back. "Are you sure this is where you want let off?"

"Yeah; home's down the road a bit here." Keith was, at least, waiting to get out of the car. 

"How far do you still have?", Shiro asked, worried; there wasn't a sign of human habitation other than the road that direction for at least a large distance. 

"Maybe an hour's hike? It's not that bad. It's peaceful out here." 

Shiro gave Matt a frown of concern, trying not to shake his head where Keith would notice; something about the whole thing bothered him, even if he knew they were both avoiding Keith shutting down on them again.

"We can get you closer - less of a walk means you can save water some." Matt leaned back around the back of his chair with a guileless grin.

Keith mulled that over, and finally nodded. "It - might help. Not many people live out here." 

Matt pulled the car down the narrow dirt road. The further out they got, the more there was just very little sign of human habitation besides the sketchy, increasingly questionable outline of a road and a few small rooftops visible spread out across the desert. They eventually reached a point where Matt couldn't get the car to reasonably go any further, with nothing more than one very small structure visible at what seemed to be the end of the road.

Shiro turned around in the seat as the car stopped. "You live out here?"

Keith froze. "....Yeah? I'm fine, really."

"Do you have anybody else?"

Keith shrank, looking out the window, away from Shiro; it took him a little too long to come up with an answer. "Well, there's Jack? He's pretty old and doesn't talk much." He was sheepish, avoiding looking at either of them, and was almost fumbling the words.

Matt didn't turn in the driver's seat, but had an eyebrow raised; the shack up ahead had no lights on and looked empty, even if it was in decent shape and clearly not abandoned.   
Keith was an awful liar, and was already opening the door and grabbing his duffel bag. 

Matt and Shiro shared a look, before Matt chimed in. "You know, if you wanted, we could always adopt you for the holidays - I know Mom and Dad wouldn't mind."

On the phrase 'adopt for the holidays' Keith froze, and then was out of the car and a few feet down the road, stopping to look back. 

Matt shrank in his chair, giving Shiro a bewildered shrug, but staying still. Shiro stepped out of the car, hands raised. "Keith - it's okay. We just wanted to make sure you were alright." 

No family, and all of the little signs of the absence of one had been there for as long as he'd been at the Garrison; as near as anyone could tell Keith didn't have more than passing contact with anybody outside the compound. 

The shack at the end of the road and the lack of other people explained a great deal of his random familiarity with survival and the local area, if he was living alone during off times. If there wasn't any kind of family in the picture, then he probably would've been dealing with legal oversight, and Shiro had seen the way he went from unsure dodging to a moment of panic at Matt's comment.

Shiro wasn't sure of the local legalities for whether Keith would count as an emancipated minor or if he was old enough yet to've aged out, but he was pretty sure that if Keith was still dealing with legal oversight, "living alone as a survivalist in the desert" was not a situation that'd be allowed for a teenager on their own. 

"You're not in trouble, and if you don't want people to know about this, we're not going to say anything." He did spare a glance back to make sure Matt was nodding behind him. "I don't have much to go home to, myself." He gave Keith a weak, hesitant smile, keeping his hands raised.

Keith seemed to relax, just slightly. "Please? I don't-" He stopped, taking a moment to grimace and re-orient. "I don't know how it'd go if word got out, and even if it was okay, people keep trying to get into everything enough as it is. I don't _need_ half the Garrison to pity me when I'm _fine_."

Shiro'd heard that he'd gotten into fights before, and there hadn't been as many lately. The way Keith almost glared on the word 'fine', Shiro could see them coming if word got out.

"Alright. Your secret's safe with us." Forcing Keith to deal with that kind of attention wouldn't help anything.

Matt leaned across the car to be better able to talk out the window. "If I need to make up anything about 'Jack' I'll let you know, so we can keep the story straight, alright?" 

Keith relaxed in a moment of visible relief. "Thanks."

Shiro paused, unsure himself; leaving Keith alone didn't sit right, even if Keith did seem to have taking care of himself together, and he knew it would bother him the entire break if he walked away and left Keith alone like this. "So uh. Could you use an extra hand around here?" 

Both Keith and Matt stared at him in blank shock. 

"I've got a plane to catch, but the tickets are refundable, and I'd just be going back to an empty house anyway..." 

Keith shrank, face gone conflicted, looking down at the scrub brush in the road. "...I ... guess? There's not a lot of space..."

"Bigger than most of the apartments would be back home." Shiro gave him a half-grin.

"I'm not helping you haul your suitcase out there," Matt announced, getting out of the car to pop open the trunk.

The shack _was_ well-kept, for something that clearly only had one person living in it, sparsely furnished with books and some other equipment tucked away here and there. Keith left his duffel bag inside the door, and Shiro parked the suitcase, while Keith gave the one couch with a blanket that apparently did double-duty as a bed a sheepish look. "I. Have a couple sleeping bags?" He rubbed the back of his head, looking over to Shiro. "Are you sure about this? I get cell reception, you might still make your flight."

Shiro shook his head. "I'm sure. I meant what I said about not having much to go home to."

Keith raised an eyebrow, uncertain, and then shrugged, pulling a couple of spare bottles of water out of the duffel bag to set them on the small table. 

"So how long have you been living out here?"

Keith thought, but it was a much less self-conscious pause than he'd had earlier in the car. "A couple years now? It won't be as big a deal next year, and I can fix this place up better after I graduate."

Next year he’d be eighteen - definitely dodging legal oversight. 

“I would’ve thought the Garrison’s best up and coming pilot would’ve had more to do over Christmas.” 

Shiro pulled out one of the chairs, folding his hands on the table. “Could say the same about the next best pilot in training.”

Keith gave a quiet, bitter snort. “I guess.”

It was like something had broken in Keith’s habits of avoidance. Shiro wasn’t sure how much leeway he had, now, but it was worth a shot. “So how’d you end up out here?”

Keith stopped, pausing over the table; it was an odd processing pause. "I found it after I started at the Garrison." He had an awkward moment of shifting wait, glancing at Shiro warily. "Drives my caseworker half up the wall not knowing where I go, but I make all of my required check-ins, so he mostly just bugs people trying to make sure I've got a roof over my head and steady food. He does grumble about how at least I'm not trying to completely vanish like some others." 

Keith was definitely watching him for what his reaction was. 

No family, and no telling how long it'd been since he'd had family. 

"Where were you before you signed up?" He knew he'd heard that Keith had been one of the cadets who signed up for an early-entry program, starting at 14; it had become a part of his reputation, the prodigy that came from nowhere. 

Another wary pause. "...All over." Keith frowned. "It's not - none of the foster homes were bad people or anything. The other kids could be assholes sometimes, but it was just ... never a good fit. I was a harder case to figure out or something, they were well-meaning but not ready, I got into a few too many fights at school or with other kids in the house." 

And his first couple years at the Garrison included stories of being in and out of disciplinary action and the infirmary, a string of fights right before he’d started hanging closer to Shiro. 

Shiro stared at his folded hands, trying to think about what it would've been like without what living family he'd had. His grandfather had been strict, and a perfectionist to be sure, but it was something; not getting passed around from home to home like an old piece of furniture. 

Keith was worth more than that, and it hurt to think of the bright cadet that could take charge of exercises so happily never having a home.

Keith had ducked his head, and went fishing in a trunk in the corner, gone quiet. 

Shiro spoke softly. "It'll be okay."

Keith froze, hands in the trunk.

"I mean it. You've been doing a lot with less than most people have, and you've still been stepping in to try to help on top of that." 

Keith just stared up at him, deadpan. "I'm not sure how much making sure you eat something counts for that."

"I've heard about the fights you'd been getting in." 

Keith flinched, shrinking in. "I know, I know, it's - a pretty big problem, I'm trying to stay out of it." 

Shiro shook his head. "No I mean, I've heard from some of other cadets, about what was going on - how you'd lost your temper because someone was pushing them around or you got in the middle of a hazing." He leaned his chin on one hand, elbow propped on the table. "And the other half of the time you were getting picked on." 

Keith's flinch stopped, but he was looking up at Shiro blankly, lost.

"Maybe not always the best way to handle it, but at least you're getting into it for the right reasons." He grinned, and Keith shrank again, wide-eyed and sheepish, suddenly more focused on retrieving what turned out to be instant coffee, a couple old mugs, and an electric kettle. 

All of it was shoved onto the table before there was a momentary pause, Keith staring at the instant coffee and back at Shiro. "...Coffee?"

Shiro was trying not to laugh. "Sure." 

He couldn't be the only person that'd ever complimented Keith; Keith was top of the class and had a few people trying to figure out how to get his attention for other reasons, but somehow, he'd still caught Keith off-guard with it. 

Granted, the way Keith was about avoiding people, he'd probably managed to avoid paying attention to all of that, too. 

Keith had some smoked meat and canned goods set aside in the shed and cooler attached to the shack. When Shiro leaned into the shed to help, he got a brief, distracted comment about "Watch your step in here, Jack gets inside sometimes" that had him unsure what Keith's 'made up roommate' actually was. There was no sign of "Jack" that night. Keith also brought in a spare sleeping bag, and firewood for the wood stove before it got too dark.

As the sun set, it struck Shiro how quiet it was. There was some ambient noise from insects and animals, but nothing else - no distant engines, no passing voices, no hum of other machinery. The vague remnants of a road disappeared in the evening dark, harder and harder to distinguish from any other shadowed rut in the hard clay of the scrub desert, and the shack seemed like the only sign the desert had anyone there at all. 

It was almost unsettling after a lifetime where the Garrison was the most rural area he'd ever been in, but Keith seemed to settle into it naturally, as content and relaxed as Shiro ever saw him with his feet on the ground. 

Before the sun had even finished setting, there were identifiable points of light - Mars, Jupiter, the occasional satellite. As it grew darker, more and more stars became visible, more dense than Shiro had ever seen from the ground, the Milky Way a broad band of glittering light across the sky. 

It was enough that he didn't notice the temperature dropping with the desert night until Keith tossed a blanket halfway over him, before perching on a rock nearby with his own thick faux-fleece wrapped around his shoulders. Shiro edged over to sit on the other side of the rock, wrapping the blanket around himself better. It had been cool out during the daytime, as close as the upland scrub got to winter, but as soon as the sun set conditions the cold had grown bitter and biting. 

Keith had the mugs out again, passing over one filled with cheap hot cocoa; the lights in the shack were off, curtains drawn, the moon and stars the only light around. 

"Closest you can get to the view outside the atmosphere without leaving the ground." Keith was smiling, neck craned to look up. 

Shiro nodded. "It's beautiful." He'd always heard about how much of a difference light pollution around towns made in the night sky, but it was hard to grasp until he'd seen it. "I bet you could almost see Algol's light changing without a telescope out here." Shiro was already scanning Perseus, finding the binary stars up above the tight cluster of the Pleiades. 

Keith laughed. "A little, but it's hard to tell if you're actually seeing it or if it's just normal atmospheric flicker." 

"I think I see why you'd want to stay out here." 

"It's part of it." 

"You've done a few ride-alongs up to the moonbase, right?" Shiro could just pick it out, a tiny clump of glowing lights on the moon's surface.

"Yeah... just little trips." 

"Once you get the hang of the gravity, when you get to spend a few days up there? There's a ledge overlooking the base where you can sit like this." He pointed, as if he could pin down the spot a little outside of the little specks of light from this far away. 

Keith nudged him with an elbow. "Any good stargazing spots on Mars?" 

They stayed outside like that for a few hours, Keith nudging Shiro for stories about the flights he'd been on so far, picking out extrasolar planets and places there might be life, until Shiro's ears were getting numb and the hot cocoa was long gone. As soon as they got inside, Keith was starting the wood stove, running through the routine from clear long practice. 

Once the fire caught and stayed, the shack started warming up bit by bit, and Keith did a quick check of the sleeping bag he'd brought in, unzipping it and shacking it out. "The blankets I've got out this time of year should be pretty good there." He nodded distractedly to where Shiro was sitting on the couch, still wrapped in the thicker blanket he'd had outside. 

"I am not kicking you out of your bed." 

Keith looked up from the sleeping bag, still hanging in his hands. "You went to this much trouble to come out here, I'm not making you sleep on the floor." 

"This is your home! You don't have any thing else!" Shiro stood up, stepping away from the couch around the small table.

Keith glared over the sleeping bag. "Shiro, I've slept in a sleeping bag in a crevice in a _rock_ during monsoons before. I'm _fine_ and you're taking the couch."

"No, I'm not." Shiro set his jaw, and dropped the blanket to the couch, holding a hand out for the sleeping bag. 

There was a staredown, and Keith finally handed over the sleeping bag - without dropping the stubborn glare at all.

Shiro took the sleeping bag a little closer to the wood stove, watching Keith suspiciously as he was pulling his shirt off and acting like he wasn't even paying attention to Shiro. He had more muscle than his uniforms let on, trim cut and lean. 

It wasn't until Shiro had gotten somewhat settled that he gathered up the blankets and pillow, walked over to a space also near-ish to the wood stove, and arranged it all on the floor.

"Keith! Come on, it's your couch!"

Keith glared up from where he was already turning the blanketpile into a sort of nest. "You came all the way out here, I'm sleeping on the floor." 

"I'm not taking your couch!" Shiro motioned at it as if he could shoo Keith to what he'd obviously been using as a bed.

Keith just stared, then curled up in the blankets with a huff.

Shiro gave up, dropping his head back against the padded pillow-cushion in the sleeping bag. The shack was quiet, dark and peaceful, with the occasional flicker from the wood stove's grate casting odd moving shadows on the walls. 

Something hadn't just broken in Keith's attitude, it had stuck that way. He knew Keith could be stubborn and was bright and active, he'd seen the kind of single-minded ambition Keith went through his classes with; it made an almost worrying contrast with how skittish and shy he got outside of class, and Shiro had been trying to figure out which side of it was the front and which was actually Keith.

He still wasn't entirely sure. Maybe both were. "So did I pass?"

"Huh?" There was a quiet shift as Keith moved in the blanketpile to look over at him. 

"You'd barely talk about anything outside of classes before. Did I pass something?"

There was only the faint crackling of the wood stove for a minute. "I've never had anybody come looking for me like this. Not when it wasn't their job, or they weren't there to take over or pawn me off on someone else." 

Shiro stared up at the ceiling and the occasional flickering shadow. "You know we really could've both gone to stay with the Holts. I know them, they would've accepted you."

Keith made a quiet frustrated noise. "I can't. I just - I grew up with almost every year being a different family trying to do a 'normal' Christmas and make a big deal out of it, and there was always something where I didn't belong. I can barely do Christmas carols anymore, it just feels like bait before the other shoe drops." 

Shiro sighed. "Should I apologize for any gifts coming late, then?"

Keith's laughter was muffled into the pillow he'd buried his face into. "You're fine. Believe me, you're fine." 

Shiro woke up to Keith draped over the sleeping bag, clinging impressively until he woke up, blinking at Shiro blearily and scrambling back in an embarrassed fluster. 

The next day, Keith went out hunting, after giving Shiro a few pointers on normal routines around the shack - the water pump, the semi-permanent camp shower, the hover bike he was rebuilding from parts. It was chilly in the daytime, enough that he didn't do much more than get water and nose around the bike, a salvaged engine that was half-built with clear gaps where Keith hadn't gotten the pieces yet. 

Keith came back in late, with a skinned, cleaned, dressed javelina wrapped and packed in the duffel bag. While he messed with an old grill out back, Shiro went into the shed to grab a couple other canned goods and some plastic spice containers.

There was an odd glint in the back corner, behind a couple boxes and a pallet of ramen, something he first took for a coil of rope in the dark, if it weren't too thick for it.   
He leaned over the boxes for a better look.

He'd seen the diamond pattern of scales on hides and pictures around town more than enough to recognize them. And the set of bony plates sprawled next to the snake. And the wedge-shaped head, a little over half as big as his hand. 

Keith leaned in the door of the shack. "Shiro? Everything okay?"

"Snake," he said simply, staring at it dumbfounded. It wasn't moving, but he was pretty sure it wasn't dead, either.

"Oh, that's Jack. He's probably brumating. Just leave him alone, he doesn't hurt anything."

Shiro stared at the snake for another minute, then shifted the pallet of ramen back, pulling the seasoning mixes off the top shelf and walking back out. 

Keith was cutting the meat as if nothing unusual had happened. He set the containers down on the old crate Keith was using for an outdoor table. 

"So. Jack's a rattlesnake."

"Yep." It actually took a minute for Keith to glance up from what he was doing with a shrug. "He's been here longer than I have. I give him space and leave him be, and he's never bothered me. Also this time of year he finds some hiding spot and sleeps until sometime in March." He went back to cutting meat, carving part of a shank into slices. "Snakes are like that; they mostly just want to be left alone."

"I can imagine the screaming if he were in the Garrison." Shiro did look back at the shed, but if the snake was asleep, the snake was asleep; Keith knew what he was doing out here better than anyone, and had accepted the big snake's presence with no fanfare or concern.

Keith rolled his eyes with a snort. "That's because most people are idiots who're afraid of anything they're not used to."

"You're afraid of talking to people but not venomous snakes." It was hard not to find it oddly endearing, in a dysfunctional kind of way, even while the extent of it was still worrying.

"Yeah." Keith looked sideways, gesturing with the knife. "Have you met people?"

Shiro shook his head with a laugh. "You know there's people at the Garrison that look up to you." 

Keith froze, looking oddly uncomfortable. "For what?"

"You're one of the best in the Garrison right now - we've been trading the top sim scores back and forth lately, and you're good at working with a team on your group exercises, better than most." 

Keith frowned, staring at the cut pork steaks. "That's not really the same. It's just - doing what I'm supposed to do, being useful because I'm good at something. It's not like what you do." He waved with the knife at Shiro, then set it down. "Last week Matt was rambling and he mentioned how you spent so much time volunteering to help everybody else with their classwork, that he had to nag you into setting peer mentoring hours so you'd have time to do your own work." 

It was Shiro's turn to shift and look away uncomfortably, wrestling an odd kind of fluttery self-conscious nervousness. "Anybody could be doing that. It's not that big of a deal."

"And not ‘anybody’ _does_ , Shiro. I can hear people talk behind my back, but - I don't think there's anybody in that base who doesn't like you." Keith wiped his hands on a damp towel. "I've been trying to figure out why you've been so determined to waste time on me." 

Shiro held the container of seasoning over, catching Keith’s wrist with his other hand when Keith reached for it. “I am not wasting my time, Keith. You’re talented and you’re a _good_ person, and you’re more than worth it, alright? You’re the only person other than Matt that’s gotten after me to take care of myself, and I barely knew you for that.” 

Keith stood still, staring at the hand on his wrist. After a long moment where he looked on the verge of tears for a moment, he let out a breath and looked up at Shiro, set and serious. “And you’re not ‘just anybody’.” 

Shiro gave him a nervous half-smile. It was easy to fuss at Keith, but having Keith’s attention fixed on him like that, with the kind of assurance Keith only ever threw into his goals, was hard to dodge. “Alright, I get it. But this means you have to agree that you’re worth something, too.” 

****************************************

Things settled into a routine over the break. Keith’s hunting lasted for a few days at a time; combined with his stores in the shed, there wasn’t much needed but to cook, clean, tend the wood stove, and work on other things. Some days they worked on the hoverbike, juggling tools between each other; some colder days they stayed inside, reading or continuing on with whatever could be pulled up on a tablet to watch.

Sunset was always spent outside, watching the stars come out, talking about where they wanted to go or what might be there. 

After the fourth night, Keith started piling the blankets next to Shiro’s sleeping bag, with occasional wary moments of checking Shiro’s reaction; Shiro had just joked about how Keith was usually draped over him in the morning anyway.

After six nights, the argument about sleeping on the couch finally settled in just sharing it, a pile of sleeping bag and blankets on the narrow space; it was warmer, anyway.   
Christmas was a day on the calendar and an alert on phones. They spent it curled up inside with blankets, instant hot chocolate, and a venison roast, sharing the couch with Keith curled up against Shiro, the better to both watch the same tablet, continuing on Shiro’s quest to introduce Keith to more of the old Star Trek series. 

“...So how bad did you want to join Starfleet as a kid.” It was oddly idle, as if it were something Keith had been thinking over for a while that almost wasn’t a question.

“Pretty bad.” Shiro chuckled quietly. “It’s kind of why I went for the Garrison. I know, I know, it’s the old astronaut stereotype.” Keith didn’t seem to be teasing, and was still quiet. “We’re getting closer all the time to that being real - going out to explore and see the universe, to find whoever might be out there and get to learn about what other civilizations might be around. I want to be there when it happens; take a ship through a nebula where stars are born, see what we can learn from people from worlds nothing like ours.” 

Keith curled in closer against him, almost nuzzling in like a tired cat. It was hard not to be self-conscious of it, and there was a tangled little knot where he wasn’t sure what to do with it. 

Which clearly meant it was time to aim for a distraction. “So, why’d you join?”   
Keith went quiet. “I dunno.” It was a little too distant, with the kind of unsure pause that happened when he was lying or avoiding a subject. “I guess… I never really belonged here on Earth; I thought - that maybe I’d find where I belonged out there, somewhere.” 

“Maybe we can look together?” He rested a hand on Keith’s shoulder; Keith’d gone out of his way to start looking out for Shiro when he had no reason to, and if anything, Shiro should’ve been responsible for the younger cadet, not the other way around. He couldn’t just leave that without doing the same, particularly when Keith had nobody looking out for him. “By the time we’re getting out of the solar system, we’ll both be graduated and have some missions under our belt. I’m sure a mission like that could use two good pilots.” 

Keith made a quiet noise, and then clung to Shiro, burying his face in Shiro’s chest. Shiro almost tipped over, and had to flail to get the tablet safely on the table so he could better curl around on the narrow couch. For a while, he was running fingers through Keith’s hair, making soothing little murmurs as Keith quietly sobbed into his chest.

When it started to settle, he ruffled Keith’s hair. “You alright?”

Keith nodded into the now-damp old shirt he’d been wearing, finally looking up with a frail, vulnerable smile. “Yeah. Better than ever, I think.” 

The fluttery kind of confusion in the back of his chest was back, and he had a distracted moment of wanting to drown Matt for teasing him before. Or pre-emptively drown Matt for the crowing he was sure was coming. “You know, you’re going to need to work on talking to people if we’re going to be partners on this. You can’t duck behind me if we’re making first contact, and if we’ve got a crew, they’ll be _your_ crew too.” 

“I can’t make any promises, but - I’ll try.” Keith flopped back down on him, adjusting to get more comfortable. 

“That’s something.” Shiro rested his hand back on Keith’s shoulders. “I’m not going to give up on you.”


End file.
